The American presidential election is tomorrow, U-Va. administrator awarded $3 million in Rolling Stone defamation, and more from the United States and around the world.

—There was another twist Sunday in a presidential campaign marked by many: FBI Director James Comey said newly discovered emails do not change the bureau’s conclusion that Hillary Clinton should not be charged with a crime. Tomorrow is Election Day.

—Rolling Stone will pay a University of Virginia administrator $3 million after a federal jury determined the magazine defamed her in a now-discredited article from 2014. More here

—Janet Reno, the Clinton-era attorney general, has died. She was 78. More here

—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).

Updates

University of Virginia Administrator Awarded $3 Million After Rolling Stone Defamation

Steve Helber / AP

Rolling Stone will pay a University of Virginia administrator $3 million after a federal jury determined the magazine defamed her in a now-discredited article from 2014.

Nicole Eramo, a dean who was poorly portrayed in an article about an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house, had sued for $7.5 million. As the Associated Press reports:

The jury concluded Friday that the magazine, its publisher and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely were responsible for libel, with actual malice.

As part of her testimony, Eramo said she experienced suicidal thoughts after the article was published. Rolling Stone is covering the legal fees of the reporter who wrote the original article.

While the article was widely circulated after it published, sparking a fierce national debate about sexual assault on college campuses, it was soon after debunked. Police in Charlottesville found no evidence to support the article’s allegations. Later, the reporter of the story revealed she never spoke to alleged perpetrators of the gang rape.

A woman wears a mask to protect herself from air pollution during a protest in Delhi, India, on November 7, 2016. (Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

The Indian government issued a health advisory Monday warning citizens to avoid high-pollution areas amid heightened concerns of a health emergency in New Delhi, the country’s capital.

The advisory is the latest measure taken byauthorities to address rising pollution levels, which the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi placed Monday afternoon at 467 micrograms per cubic meters—a level considered “hazardous” for the high risk of respiratory ailments. The Indian government also declared a three-day closure of schools in the capital, as well as a five-day moratorium on construction and demolitions—considered one of the primary contributors to the city’s high-pollution levels.

Hundreds of people demonstrated in central New Delhi Sunday calling on officials to reduce pollution levels in the city, considered one of the most polluted in the world. Here’s what the protests looked like:

Aurora, Colorado, Pays $2.6 Million to Family of Unarmed Black Man Shot to Death by Police

Aurora police officers in 2008 (Mark Leffingwell / Reuters)

Aurora will pay $2.6 million to the family of an unarmed black man who was fatally shot by police last year last year, marking the largest settlement in the Colorado city’s history.

The settlement to the family of Naeschylus Carter-Vinzant will also include reforms to the Aurora Police Department intended to increase police accountability and improve officer relations with the community, The Denver Postreported Monday.

Carter-Vinzant, 27, was shot and killed in March 2015 by police officer Paul Jerothe. Jerothe became an Aurora Police officer in 2006 and provided live-saving medical assistance to victims of the 2012 Aurora movie-theater shooting that left 12 people dead. The case was presented to a grand jury, which determined in December there was not sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against Jerothe. Carter-Vinzant’s family said then it would “look beyond the grand jury for other lawful means for justice and progress.”

The fatal shooting occurred as SWAT officers attempted to arrest Carter-Vinzant for crimes including domestic violence, kidnapping, and removing an ankle bracelet he was required to wear as part of his parole. Three days before he was shot, Carter-Vinzant had reportedly smashed the window of his wife’s car, punched her in the face, took their two-month old child and her purse from the vehicle, and fled. When officers approached Carter-Vinzant on the street, he appeared to be talking on a cellphone and had his right arm in the pocket of his jacket, according to the grand-jury report. Carter-Vinzant ran, and Jerothe shot him.

An Aurora city official said Monday the settlement “is in the best interests of the family and the community.”

Several U.S. cities have recently paid settlements to the families of unarmed black men killed by white police officers, most of whom were not criminally charged in the deaths. In 2015, Eric Garner’s family received $5.9 million from New York City; Freddie Gray’s family received $6.4 million from Baltimore; and Walter Scott’s family received $6.5 million from North Charleston, South Carolina. In April, the family of Tamir Rice received $6 million from the city of Cleveland, 17 months after the 12-year-old boy was killed.

Mikheil Saakashvili, the governor of Ukraine's southern Odessa region, speaks at a press conference where he announced his resignation on November 7. (Reuters)

Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president who was appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region last May, resigned Monday, citing his frustration with persistent corruption.

Saakashvili, Georgia’s president until 2013, was known for his pro-Western views and his wariness of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last May, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, who is embroiled in his own battle with Putin’s Russia, named Saakashvili governor of Odessa province, and gave him the task of reducing corruption and increasing transparency in the region. But Saakashvili said Monday government officials continue to take bribes, The New York Timesreported.

“The president personally supports two clans,” Saakashvili told reporters. “Odessa can only develop once Kiev will be freed from these bribe takers, who directly patronize organized crime and lawlessness.”

In Odessa, Mr. Saakashvili and a team of young reformists tried to tackle the acceptance of bribes in the corruption-plagued customs service and to make government services more responsive and transparent.

Yet, government officials in Kiev thwarted these efforts, Mr. Saakashvili said, because they interfered with the various enrichment schemes that allowed many of them to amass healthy fortunes.

Mr. Saakashvili said his plan to open a new customs service center in Odessa was undone when the money allocated for its refurbishment was stolen.

Saakashvili was granted Ukrainian citizenship after his presidential term ended in Georgia. Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Odessa’s police chief and a fellow Georgian, has also resigned.

Nicaragua's Ortega Easily Wins Reelection in a Vote the Opposition Says Is Rigged

Reuters

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega easily won a third term on Sunday in an election the opposition has called rigged at best, if not a complete farce.

Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla, leads the country’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, the group that removed the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza from power in 1979. Ortega was president from 1979 until 1990 when he was ousted in an election upset. He regained the presidency in 2006 and has since become increasingly authoritarian, removing term limits, installing friends and relatives in political office, and is accused of setting up a “family dictatorship.” For his next five-year term, Ortega’s wife will serve as his vice president. Many believe she will eventually take over the party. But Ortega is also popular given Nicaragua’s economic growth and its relatively low levels of violence compared to its Central American neighbors.

Ortega won 72 percent of the vote Sunday, with about 65 percent of the country’s 3.8 million registered voters showing up to the polls. This number has been disputed, however, and the opposition party says far fewer people voted because citizens knew there would be little true competition in the race. Five other candidates ran for president, but none were considered serious competition, because in July Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council removed much of the opposition Broad Front for Democracy’s leaders from congress. They refused to recognize their party’s appointed leader, Pedro Reyes, a man regarded as an Ortega ally.

5.0 Earthquake Strikes Near Major Oklahoma Oil Hub

Several buildings in Cushing, Oklahoma—dubbed the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World”—sustained “substantial damage” after a 5.0-magnitude earthquake struck Sunday night.

Steve Spears, the Cushing city manager, said at a news conference Monday that approximately 40 to 50 buildings were damaged, though no major injuries were reported. Cushing is home to one of the world’s largest crude-oil storage terminals. No damage to the pipelines, however, was reported and the oil and gas division of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission said Monday the pipelines resumed normal operations.

The city’s downtown area has been evacuated until the infrastructure can be fully examined. Here’s what the damage looked like:

The Latest on the Battles Against ISIS in Raqqa and Mosul

Azad Lashkari / Reuters

Kurdish forces began the fight to take back Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de-facto capital in Syria, while in Iraq on Monday the fight to reclaim Mosul entered its fourth week. Both cities represent ISIS’s most crucial strongholds, and the loss of either would likely devastate the insurgents.

While the offensive in Mosul, which was seized by ISIS in 2014, has gone according to plan—even ahead of schedule—Raqqa presents an especially difficult operation. In Mosul, Iraqi security forces are working with Kurdish peshmerga, as well as the Shia Popular Mobilization Forces, and are backed by U.S. airstrikes. They have cleared ISIS from many of the villages surrounding Mosul, and government soldiers are moving closer to downtown Mosul from the east. ISIS has used snipers, car bombs, and positioned civilians as human shields to slow the advance, but so far the plan to retake the city, Iraq’s second-biggest, is going well.

"Everything in Mosul is ahead of schedule on all axes of advance, but Daesh, as we expected, is putting up a fierce fight and I expect this will take some time to conclude," said Brett McGurk, U.S. State Department's special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS.

In Raqqa, the Syrian city ISIS claimed in 2014, international politics makes the battle much less straightforward. The U.S., France and Britain said they will provide air support to the Syria Democratic Forces, a hodgepodge of mostly Arab and Kurdish fighters that sometimes fight among themselves. Complicating the operation is that Russia backs the Syrian government, and while Turkey and the U.S. have so far shared an interest in helping rebels, Turkey views the Kurdish forces as a threat. Everyone involved is interested in ridding the region of ISIS, but the most advantageous way to do this has complicated the more than five-year-long civil war in Syria. Collectively, there are about 30,000 fighters who will work to retake Raqqa, home to about 200,000 civilians and an estimated 5,000 ISIS insurgents.

China Prevents 2 Hong Kong Lawmakers From Taking Office

China has prevented two pro-independence Hong Kong lawmakers from taking office after they refused to pledge allegiance to Beijing while being sworn in. The move is the most direct intervention by Beijing in Hong Kong’s affairs since the handover of the former British colony in 1997—and critics say it’s the beginning of the end of Hong Kong.

Chinese authorities bypassed Hong Kong’s courts and blocked Sixtus Leung and Yau Wai-ching, who are both legally elected, from taking their seats in the legislature. Beijing used a section of the Chinese territory’s laws that bars from office any official who doesn’t “sincerely and solemnly” take the oath. Under the one-country-two-systems formula that has governed relations between Beijing and Hong Kong since the handover, the territory enjoys wide-ranging autonomy, but Beijing still has final say over how the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini constitution, is interpreted.

Sweden Sets New Date for Julian Assange's Interview

(Markus Schreiber / AP)

Swedish authorities will interview Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on November 14, the Swedish prosecutor’s office said Monday. Authorities were scheduled to interview the WikiLeaks founder on October 17, but delayed the process so Assange’s attorney could be present.

Assange was arrested [in the U.K.] in 2010 under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden over claims of sexual assault—claims he denies. But in 2012, while on bail, he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London so he could avoid extradition. Last year, Swedish authorities dropped two cases of sexual assault against him, though the allegation of rape still stands—and it’s in connection with that case the Swedish prosecutor wants to question him. Assange says he fears that if he’s sent to Sweden he’d be extradited to the U.S., whose secret diplomatic cables were published by Wikileaks. The U.S. says there’s no sealed indictment against Assange.

Ecuador had agreed in August to let Swedish authorities interview Assange, ending an impasse over the investigation into the rape allegation. But in that time, Assange, lauded as a hero by his supporters and reviled by his critics, has emerged as a figure in the U.S. presidential election. WikiLeaks, the group he founded, has released emails purported to belong to John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Assange has appeared on Fox News to discuss those leaks, and Ecuador cut off his internet access at its embassy in London because, it said, it didn’t want to influence an election in another country.

Philadelphia’s weeklong transit strike is over. The Transport Workers Union Local 234, which represents some 5,000 transit workers in the city, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) said Monday they have reached a tentative agreement over a new contract.

The sides have tentatively agreed to a new five-year contract, WPVI-TV, the local ABC affiliate, reported. SEPTA service will be restored Monday in phases.

Here’s what separated the two sides when the union announced the strike last week, via Philly.com:

Union workers were unwilling to accept the possibility of health care hikes that could have boosted their contribution from $552 a year to up to $6,000 if they wanted to keep equivalent medical coverage, union representatives said. They also were unhappy about a pension cap at $50,000 for workers while managers' pensions had no cap at all. Matters not related to dollars and cents were also in dispute. TWU members said SEPTA's break policies for vehicle operators barely left them enough time to use the bathroom between routes, and complained the nine hours of down time a worker must receive between shifts was not enough, forcing operators to drive vehicles while fatigued.

SEPTA, for its part, argued its $1.2 billion pension is only 62 percent funded and a substantial increase in pension benefits would make that disparity worse. It also said workers currently enjoy a "Cadillac" health care plan that costs them just $46 a month, and that work was already underway to adjust schedules.

The strike affected all of SEPTA’s operations: buses, trolleys, and subways, which together run about 850,000 trips per day.

There were fears a prolonged dispute could have an impact on Tuesday’s presidential election. Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is targeting Pennsylvania, a Democratic stronghold. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign is relying heavily on the strongly Democratic turnout in Philadelphia and its suburbs to keep the state blue.

Janet Reno, First Female Attorney General, Dies at 78

Janet Reno, the Clinton-era attorney general who was the first woman to hold that position, died early Monday, her goddaughter told the Associated Press. Reno was 78.

Here’s more:

Reno died from complications of Parkinson's disease, her goddaughter Gabrielle D'Alemberte said. D'Alemberte said Reno spent her final days at home in Miami surrounded by family and friends.

Reno, a former prosecutor, is best known for being at the center of perhaps two of the most controversial moments of Bill Clinton’s presidency: the siege at Waco, Texas, that ended with the deaths of David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, and about 80 of his followers; and the seizure of Elian Gonzalez, the 5-year-old Cuban boy taken by federal agents from his relatives in Miami and returned to his father in Cuba.

More from the AP: “After Waco, Reno figured into some of the controversies and scandals that marked the Clinton administration, including Whitewater, Filegate, bungling at the FBI laboratory, Monica Lewinsky, alleged Chinese nuclear spying and questionable campaign financing in the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election.”

Reno ran unsuccessfully for Florida governor in 2002, losing in the Democratic primary.

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Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.

1.

To be a parent is to be compromised.You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.

Americans could learn from how drastically German society has moved away from the nadir of its history.

Recently, a visitor to a southern plantation wrote a viral tweet complaining about a guide who forced her to spend her vacation hearing about slavery. Some tourists at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Mount Vernon, The Washington Post reported last week, are posting negative reviews on TripAdvisor and elsewhere because of the barest mention of the African Americans who were forced to work at the third president’s home, creating much of the wealth that made the glories of Monticello possible.

As an American Jew from the South who has lived in Berlin for decades, I’ve been asked whether Americans, in contemplating a plantation home, Confederate statue, or some other monument to our nation’s slave past, should emulate the way Germans treat Nazi memorials. To which I respond: There aren’t any. Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them. Instead, it has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism.

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action.

Twenty-five years ago, Friends anticipated a time that would both romanticize and mistrust the culture of work.

In an episode in the fourthseason of Friends, Monica, Rachel, Chandler, and Joey find themselves engaged in an argument: Chandler and Joey, they claim, know Monica and Rachel much better than the women know them. Before long, the debate devolves into a game-show-style quiz. The host: Ross, who delights in the job. The topic: the minutiae of the friends’ lives. The stakes (which have become, through a series of predictably zany events, incredibly high): If the women lose the game, they have agreed, they will trade apartments with Chandler and Joey.

The correct answers quickly proliferate; as friends who are basically family, these people know each other’s stories really, really well. “Joey had an imaginary childhood friend. His name was …?” / “Maurice!” / “Correct. His profession was …?” / “Space cowboy!”; “According to Chandler, what phenomenon ‘scares the bejeezus’ out of him?” / “Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance!”; “Rachel claims this is her favorite movie …” / “Dangerous Liaisons!” / “Correct. Her actual favorite movie is …?” / “Weekend at Bernie’s!”

Kelley Williams-Bolar, like Felicity Huffman, was punished for trying to get her children a better education.

A few months ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar started getting phone calls in the middle of the night, telling her she was on the news again. People were tagging her on Facebook and mentioning her on Twitter. “Honestly, I didn’t put the two together! I didn’t think other people would put the two together!” she told me this week.

The “two together” are Williams-Bolar and Felicity Huffman. Both are committed mothers of daughters. Both are working women. Both have become national-media sensations. Both are accused of committing crimes to obtain a better education for their children.

But Williams-Bolar and Huffman are not so much analogues as funhouse-mirror versions of each other, their stories of justice and injustice similar and yet distorted and converse. Huffman, who starred on Desperate Housewives, has admitted to paying $15,000 for a proctor to correct her daughter’s standardized-test scores. She was swept up in the “Varsity Blues” investigation into corruption, bribery, and fraud in elite-college admissions, and today she received a two-week sentence. A decade ago, Williams-Bolar was a single, black mother living in public housing. In 2011, the state of Ohio convicted and imprisoned her for falsifying her address to get her kids into better public schools. At Huffman’s sentencing hearing, a federal prosecutor cited Williams-Bolar’s case, calling prison the “great leveler.”

In sports, and in life, Europe and the United States see their societies differently—just not in the ways you might expect.

Memphis, Tennessee, is known for lots of things: Elvis Presley and B. B. King, the blues and barbecue. All these things, and more. But not Grizzly bears.

I did not think much of this while on holiday from London when my wife and I escaped the city’s steaming, unbearable heat to look through the Memphis Grizzlies’ (gloriously air-conditioned) fan store. The Grizzlies are the city’s professional basketball team. Their mascot is Griz the Grizzly Bear. Their crest is a Grizzly bear. It’s all about the bear.

Puzzlingly, in one corner of the store were shirts and other merchandise for a team called the Vancouver Grizzlies—one whose name made much more sense. In fact, the two teams were the same franchise, which in 2001 relocated 1,900 miles, across an international border and three time zones. Vancouver had not been able to support a professional basketball team, so the Grizzlies left for Tennessee. This is not unique in American sports—even in Tennessee. In 1997, American football’s Houston Oilers moved to Nashville, where they played, incongruously, as the Tennessee Oilers before becoming the Tennessee Titans. The most absurd example remains the Jazz: a perfect name for a basketball team from New Orleans, where it was based; less so from Utah, where it now resides.

The U.S. is in the top tier of house sizes internationally—and it’s not just because of McMansions.

America is a place defined by bigness. It is infamous, both within its borders and abroad, for the size of its cars, its portions, its defense budget—and its houses.

Rightly so: U.S. houses are among the biggest—if not the biggest—in the world. According to the real-estate firms Zillow and Redfin, the median size of an American single-family home is in the neighborhood of 1,600 or 1,650 square feet. About five years ago, Sonia A. Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Georgia, was working on a book about land-use patterns in the U.S., and when she tracked down the average size of dwellings for about two dozen countries, the U.S. came out on top. Her comparisons were rough because she’d cobbled together her data from various sources, but she found that American living spaces had a good 600 to 800 square feet on most of the competition.

Ivanka was always Trump’s favorite. But Don Jr. is emerging as his natural successor.

The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich Trump knows his clientele.

Curtained-off “private boxes” line the wall opposite the bar, inside of which are beds, and women, and scales to weigh gold powder, the preferred method of payment for services rendered. Word of the restaurant’s off-menu accommodations spreads fast. “Respectable women” are advised by The Yukon Sun to avoid the place, as they are “liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings.”

For many participants, the program that provides health care to millions of low-income Americans isn’t free. It’s a loan. And the government expects to be repaid.

The folded American flag from her father’s military funeral is displayed on the mantel in Tawanda Rhodes’s living room. Joseph Victorian, a descendant of Creole slaves, had enlisted in the Army 10 days after learning that the United States was going to war with Korea.

After he was wounded in combat, Joseph was stationed at a military base in Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with Edna Smith-Rhodes, a young woman who had recently moved to Boston from North Carolina. The couple started a family and eventually settled in the brick towers of the Columbia Point housing project. Joseph took a welding job at a shipyard and pressed laundry on the side; later, Edna would put her southern cooking skills to use in a school cafeteria. In 1979, Joseph and Edna bought a house in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for $24,000.